How We Touch
by Phoebe Dynamite
Summary: All her gloom is loosened, melting against him as it transforms into glittering submission. One-shot.


"_You __are extremely sexy, unbelievably sexy...You know what you are, you're polymorphously perverse...you're exceptional in bed because you got - you get pleasure in every part of your body when I touch it...Like the tip of your nose, and if I stroke your teeth or your kneecaps...you get excited._" - _Annie Hall_

* * *

><p>It's a tough morning. Beckett got the call in the shallow hours before dawn, and by the time she got to the crime scene, a cold light was brewing in a distance not nearly close enough, a reminder to her of how little sleep she had been getting over the last few days. She wasn't in the mood for Pearlmutter or the stench of the East River, but both cement her groggy agitation to its place; as she rides the elevator up to her mostly empty floor of the Precinct, it all takes on the achiness of a fledgling fever, and it's enough to send her straight to her desk with a scowl. She makes calls for prints and others for surveillance footage, but she has that rocklike feeling sitting on her chest that she'll be waiting by the phone at least until lunchtime (which reminds her, she was thwarted in her plans to get up and make a decent lunch before leaving for work at a normal hour). She tries to start up her murder board, but with little information, the sight of it just burns her already frayed edges with further annoyance. She sent Esposito out to look for witnesses, and Ryan has the day off (she remembers, abruptly, that today is Jenny's first doctor's appointment, the first time Ryan will get to catch a glimpse of his kid, and this warms her and makes her oddly sad at the same time). It all serves to take what feels weirdly like cold, sharp salad tongs to her insides and carelessly scramble her, leaving a mess in a cool, calm, collected detective's clothing. She's distracted, and then distracted even more so by how much energy she devotes to trying to snap her focus into place. She's standing at the board, brows knit, heel grinded into the floor, marker to her chin, underneath more layers of exhaustion and depletion than she'd ever outright admit, when it all gets unquestionably worse.<p>

From somewhere out in her orbit comes the familiar sound of the Captain's door opening. A voice calls out her name, and in a flash that's far too reminiscent of an episode of PTSD, she's hit straight to the chest. Her whole body goes cold. All her weakly fortified interior structures go up in a silent, stealthy detonation.

Without any conscious effort whatsoever, through some unearthed internal wiring that the troubles of the morning have tapped into, she had been expecting to hear Montgomery's voice.

She turns to see Gates leaning out of her office door. She's dressed in what her partner has dubbed "power indigo" and her shark eyes spell out her quickly waning patience. Beckett just stares at her, mouth slightly ajar, extremities crying out for feeling to return to them. Without giving her stilted body this courtesy, she moves towards her boss, ignoring the cavernous rush in her ears, the sound that means her heart is dangerously overworked but she has to act otherwise. She stands there while Gates barks some demands and questions at her, answers them without a hitch in her tremulous breath. No one would know by looking at her; she could fool even herself. But as she walks back to her desk she knows that she'll have to brace her shaking hands on its surface. She needs something to catch. No, she'll never admit it, never let any of it float to the surface, but she's having a really bad morning.

When Lanie calls and tells her to come to the morgue, the timing couldn't be better. The journey there clears her head. Once she sees the victim and the M.E. offers up her information – which is thankfully helpful – she feels better. She recalls the hard truths she had believed set in place like headstones within, remembered, but certainly buried. Montgomery has been dead for nearly two and a half years. The Precinct isn't warm with his presence anymore. But even knowing and accepting all of that doesn't mean that she can catch every flyaway piece of sensory shrapnel, dislodged from all her memories. It's like how she sometimes automatically dials her mother's phone number when something's festering in her mind, even after all these years. Even the best cops with the keenest eyes sometimes miss the telltale sign.

Beckett gets off of the elevator and is set at ease by the sight of Esposito gathering information at his desk, phone stilled on his shoulder. His furious writing on a sheet of paper combines with her newly acquired information to set in place her armor. There's a case. Yes, it feels like she's been awake for days, and this morning has been less than ideal (especially for a Monday), but there's a case that needs her attention. She sees the man's gray, buldgeoned face under the morgue's harsh light and mentally injects herself with some of the steel she carries in her reserves.

She approaches her desk, and there, amid her curled, dead-insect-like post-its and scattered files, is a cup of coffee. Steam smuggles itself out from the slit in the lid into the air and then disappears forever, leaving a faint imprint of its heat and scent. She smiles lopsidedly and checks her watch. It's nearing nine o'clock, a perfect time for coffee on a day in which she gets a little bit of a later start. But this will do. This certainly will do. She needs the caffeine like an embrace, like a hit, and as she brings the perfectly warm to-go cup to her ready, aching lips, she grins unabashedly to see his writing, stark and black, across the white plastic lid.

_**OUR FOREPLAY.**_

He somehow always knows. Like her wants and aches are his, and his pains manifest themselves in her own body, they uncannily understand when they need each other, or at least need a subtle, redemptive gesture. Like this. Like her exact coffee order at an amazingly present temperature. Like his penmanship. Like his boldness that never backs down at her weaknesses.

Their foreplay.

"Yo, Beckett," Esposito says, hanging up the phone and beginning to move towards the elevator. "Got the address of the woman who matches the dockworker's description. Lives in Red Hook."

"Alright, let's go." Already there's a true sternness in her voice and a confident edge to her step, and she's only had a sip so far. The grin has been abandoned, shelved away for another time, but his coffee goes with her, and she doesn't even bother to hide the words from Espo. There'd be no point; everyone is used to the slight but certain shift in the writer and cop's dynamic by now. On the ride down to Brooklyn she drinks the stuff normally, thoughtlessly, but when she catches sight of the evidence of his touch, she can't help but draw back the curtain a bit to reveal the sparks triumphing over her lips, effortlessly conquering her eyes.

The liquid careens through her, touching everywhere that needs to be touched. It brings fulfillment. Satisfaction, languidly achieved but efficiently and generously distributed throughout her body. She's warm with him, all her favorite flavors and textures that he's known practically since day one creating friction against every available surface – her tongue, her throat, her smoothed-out tunnels within her breast that dive straight into her stomach. All of the places once occupied by butterflies now glow like melted gold, given respite by this way he has found of getting to her – to the very heart of her – without even being physically present.

All of Richard Castle's love, this brilliant sensation he dedicates to her daily, roasted and poured and licking whorls of fire through her body. She knows what this all means.

Her day might have started out poorly, but it will end with him. Like a thrilling book, he will take her away.

* * *

><p>She gets the text from Ryan around 2:30: "<em>Perfect. The kid is perfect<em>." A phone photo of the ultrasound comes attached and opens before her eyes. Javier must get it, too; she can hear his happy release of air just a few feet away. Without having to check, she knows Ryan also sent the message to Castle.

"Unbelievable," she rides out on a breath.

"You're telling me." Beckett looks up to see Espo smiling down at the picture, and the image endears her instantly to her fellow detective, in spite of their scuffle five minutes prior about two equally frustrating leads.

"Tell your boy I got godfather," Esposito says, snapping his phone shut and slipping it in his pocket. "I don't care that he called it."

Beckett surpresses a laugh and throws her hands up in surrender. "Hey, this has nothing to do with me."

"No, no, Beckett, you gotta be on my side. After being denied the best man position I deserve this. Castle can get their next one."

"Or he can do it for your kid." She shrugs, closing the text message and leaning back against her desk. "You guys can work out a system, a three-way godfather arrangement."

Esposito ponders this for a moment and then says in total seriousness, "But then that means that Ryan gets to do it for you and Castle's kid. He'd get both of you. I'm not seeing how that's fair."

She just smiles easily at her old friend, genuinely moved at his desire to be so infused so importantly in her life and that of her hypothetical child. She and Castle have only vaguely alluded to such talk, to a future that includes little Castle babies, but she doesn't mind Javier talking like this. It's harmless, especially since her partner isn't around to hear it.

Her phone rings, and she just knows. "Speak of the devil," she mutters as she slides her thumb across the screen and brings it to her ear. "Beckett," she answers. (Even now, most of their daily phone interactions forgo the more intimate greetings in favor of their usual, their stated names.)

"Did you get it?" he asks gleefully.

She comes apart like melting ice caps at hearing his voice like that. "I did," she replies, moving instinctively towards the hall, where it's quieter. "It's pretty crazy."

"Oh man, I can't wait to impart all of my knowledge on Ryan. He's not gonna know what hit 'em when this baby's born."

She pauses, listens closer. "Are you going through that back closest?" she asks.

She hears him draw in a breath while from somewhere around him comes the sound of something falling off a shelf and crashing to the ground. She knows he's considering lying, but he's been caught. That's one of his frequent complaints these days – that he never gets a way with anything anymore. But it's a barely-secret delight for both of them, how they always know, know each other so seamlessly.

"I have a bunch of my old parenting books in here," he finally relents.

Beckett sighs through a laugh. "Cas, don't you think those might be a tad outdated?"

"C'mon, it's classic advice. Alexis might not have survived that first year without it." He swears suddenly and she guesses he's stubbed his toe or stepped on something.

"What are you doing home anyway?" she gets out around her smile. "You were excused today because you were supposed to be apartment hunting with your mother."

"I was able to sneak away for a bit."

She feels a heated blush move across the slope between her shoulders and breasts. "Enough time to sneak into the Precinct?"

She can picture his tender smile, the one that cushions his eyes, bathes their blueness in blithe happiness. It's as if it caresses her, embedded as it is in all that she feels and thinks.

"How was that coffee, Detective?"

So good. Oh, so good, she wants to tell him. Within her are the embers of all his heat, and now that she can hear his breath, it's as if a wind's picked up inside of her, stirring it all up again. She licks her lips slowly, gleaning the remaining taste of his affection.

"Just what I needed."

She's ruthless, employing her bedroom voice now.

He hums into the phone, a satisfied, hungry half-purr that bids entrance inside her. A soundless avalanche overcomes her, burying her vulnerable senses with images of Saturday night (which tumbled right into Sunday morning). His mouth on every sliver of skin he could find, scorching her, his fingers bruising in their grips on her thighs as he relentlessly took everything that was once just hers and breathed new life into it, making it theirs. The way he was able to fill her with a worship that she could return just as fully, chaining them together in tangled limbs and blinding heat and promises.

"Need anything else?" he asks, pulling her out of her self-burial, though from the sound of his voice, his thoughts must have not been too dissimilar to hers.

"You," she lets out immediately, feeling the sureness and the rawness of her honesty like a blade through her chest. "Just you." Always you.

There's quiet for a few moments, both of them wanting and needing what's not directly there to grab for, and then he says, low and soft, "Go to our spot."

She wants to be repulsed, but really, she's aroused. What he's doing to her combats all her defeat and darkness, always has, and so she complies, listens to her partner. She walks down the hall, watching to see if anyone takes notice of her professional stride that actually feels more like she's a teenager sneaking into a boy's room. She takes the stairs quickly and is soon inside the supply closet on the archives floor. She's breathless – but not from the repressed excitement that sped her down a few flights of stairs.

"I'm here," she tells him tenderly, smiling as if he can see her.

"You think I want to have phone sex, don't you?"

She curls into herself, bringing the phone even closer to her lips, her smile as cracked open as a tectonic fissure in the earth. "I think you have a little more up your sleeve than just that. But I need it enough right now that I might have done it."

"Save it for later," he says, his voice light but still somehow serious. The voice of someone capable of deep care, of forever-love. "Save it for home."

Home. More than anything that's what she wants, to be in his bed, with access to his kitchen and his couch and his seemingly endless library of books and movies. She wants her strongest antidote to a morning like her morning. To be enraptured in everything that is his, all of it a second skin that treats her better and does less gradual damage than all her armor. She hasn't given up her place yet, but Castle's loft is where she is unquestionably happiest these days. Alexis is away at school, and Martha is flirting (in her noncommittal, Martha way) with getting her own place, so while Beckett loves the feeling of family that permeates there, to know that maybe, someday – someday soon (for they've agreed, after all these years, to start living in the sooner rather than the later) – it will be just him and hers nearly breaks her. Another theirs.

"So why'd you bring me down here?" she asks, the heaviness of their life together on her tongue and in her voice.

"Check in that empty file case on the third shelf from the top."

She does as he says, her fingers catching the film of years' worth of dust in the process, and then she feels a thin stack of crisp white paper. She bring it out into the sparse light of the closet to see the swoops and jumbles and knots of his handwriting, offered up to her like his smile, so distinctly his, spreading instant joy throughout her body.

"It's a little deleted scene from _Sudden Heat_," her tells her. He sounds so close, like he's breathing the words into her ear from over her shoulder, and she shivers and sighs in want and phantom touch.

She reads the first few words but then stops herself, smiling wide, and makes herself say, "You want me to read your dirty thoughts at work? How I am supposed to go back up there after this?"

"Like that one time we had to go to a crime scene only a few blocks from your place and got the call right in the middle of – "

"The big summer blackout." His hands, scaling her; her lips, storming him. "Yeah, that took some pretending on our part, didn't it?" She knows they're sharing the same devilish smile right now.

"I…" She looks down at the words, so enticing, better than roses or wine or music or a soft, beckoning mattress. His words, her siren song, waiting for her on some sweet island of escape and bliss. She makes herself swallow, remembering where she is. "We're in the middle of a case," she regretfully informs him.

"I know," he says. "Getting anywhere with it?"

"It's a little touch-and-go," she says, mindlessly running her hand over the very faint indentations the pressure of his pen has left on the page. "Hopefully something pans out by the end of the day."

"It will." He pauses for a moment, the silence allowing some confidence in herself and her team to materialize and giving him a moment to imagine her as she is, tired, happy, struggling, with his pages in their closet. "I wish I could be there," he tells her.

"Tomorrow," she says, her tone a bit stronger, even though she wishes the same. "Right now you've made a commitment to Martha."

She can hear the chuckle belying his voice when he says, "You really want her to get her own place, don't you?"

She almost reasserts her genuine love for his mother, but she stops herself, lets the flooding truth inside of her come for this moment. "Soon," she says, the word thick with the kind of promise only he used to make, back before she dove in willingly, wanting all of it, every part.

"Soon," he replies.

The quiet is full of everything, and she drowns in it. She holds the papers to her chest and lets out a breath for him, letting him know, as he sometimes needs to, that she is there, alive, his, wanting all of the same things as he does. The same page. She needs him to know.

"Read it when you get a moment," he eventually says. "If you need me, you know the number."

She lets out a silky ribbon of laughter. "That I do." She looks down at the pages she's tipped back from her chest a bit and sees the words "_He takes her hand, his thumb grazing that place in her palm that is most sensitive to his touch, and leads her with calm, certain steps to her bedroom._" The smile falls a bit from her face but everything that it signifies drips down into her thrumming, content heart.

"Thank you, Rick."

"Always, Kate."

They hang up like they're leaving each other's arms. She only takes a moment of the silence and the aloneness before she opens the door and moves to the elevator, holding the papers as if they are pertinent to her work. When she gets to her floor, Esposito is waiting for her with a new lead. She deposits Castle's words in the bottom of her desk drawer, silently wanting them as she goes about with her work, but knowing that they will get their moment. She knows this about them now. Sometimes it takes four years, but she and Castle, they eventually get their moment.

The new lead is promising, but after a few hours, complete with visits around town and an interrogation, they hit a dead end. It's nearly four o'clock by that point, and as soon as the realization of hard work hitting a wall gets to her, a fiery strain grips her neck and her eyes lose focus. She's aching, tired. Soon she'll be able to call it a day, but it's still early yet, and Gates is pacing around her office like a dragon in its lair, impatient, unsatisfied by what her team has come up with. That's when she knows that it's time for some relief.

She goes back down to the supply closet, the scene of one or two (or twenty) of their little midday trysts (the ones endeavored when needed during particularly tough or boring days, when everyone else is around, not the ones in interrogation or sparring rooms when everyone else has gone home for the night). She sits on a small stepladder and devours his handwriting and the emotions it bears, the ambiance it creates, the new world into which it allows her entrance. Breathless, she reads the way Rook soothes Nikki after a brutal few days on the job. He takes care of her. He takes her darkened body and, piece by piece, lights it all back up again.

Beckett has to stop with only two pages left. She presses her fingers to her lips, not to stifle a smile, but to hold in something that feels suspiciously like tears. This isn't a steamy sex scene. Sure, there is detail to the way that the characters explore one another (detail that was deepened, heightened after the writer and his muse finally fell into bed together) but this isn't something written for hot-and-bothered readers to mull over while clutching their comforters in the dark. He doesn't want to share this with the rest of the world. This isn't a sex scene. Rook and Nikki aren't just having hot sex; they're long past that. They are making love. This is a love scene.

She pulls out her phone and sends him a text. _I'm leaving at 5. Meet me at my place at 5:45. We're going dancing._

This case won't get solved today, but that's okay. That's what tomorrow is for. Tomorrow, when he'll be here, too, and they'll stand at the murder board together and theorize together and finish each other's thoughts. When they'll solve it together. She's leaving today at a normal person hour, and even though her body is wailing with exhaustion, she knows that once she's finished reading what he has so thoughtfully written and left for her – knowing, somehow always knowing – she'll flare up with a renewed energy.

* * *

><p>As soon as she sees the dress in her closet, she remembers the look one his face the last time she wore it in front of him. The way his jaw dropped at her nearness, at her grip on his shoulders, her mouth to his ear, her hair grazing his face as she turned away. Smiling wildly, she discards her professional getup and slips the dress over her curves. As soon as the fabric settles into place against her skin in all the right ways, she's dying to be under the heat in his eyes and hands, knowing that this time she can and will return it, all of it.<p>

She tousles her hair, applies some lipstick. She sprays some perfume along her neck (and a little further), each spritz taking away the hardness of the day. She rubs lotion on her long, lithe legs and slips on a pair of heels. For just a moment, after all that is done, the case reenters her mind, the man with his face bashed in down by the river and his ex-wife, at home in Pennsylvania with their kids, crying at Beckett's news, delivered regretfully over the phone.

There's a knock on the door; her pent-up breath releases at the sound. She goes a little too quickly to answer, anxious to see him, wanting to put away the sorrow of a homicide detective's life in favor of nightlife and music and a living, breathing body that demands all of her attention.

She opens the door. Her smile is bright, full, and she has a hello ready, but before it even gets out, he's on her. His hands encapsulate her neck and his fingers curl possessively around the strands of hair that they find in their path. His thumbs make their claims along the ridge of her jaw. She moans into his mouth, the sound lost somewhere between their desperate tongues and obliging lips. He braces her against the wall, her leg rising to take his into its embrace.

"It's been too long, Kate Beckett," he grinds out as he moves down to greet her exposed, willing neck. "Ooh, you smell good."

"Saw you yesterday morning," she pants, her fingers clenching at the air as he swipes over her ecstatic pulse.

He leans back and looks at her with hooded eyes, a smirk teasing the corner of his mouth. Oh, his mouth. His mouth that's capable of infinite magic –

"I wouldn't call you finally stumbling out of bed around 3 in the afternoon 'morning'," he informs her.

She wraps her arms around his neck and brings his forehead to rest against hers. It's strangely erotic to breathe the same air as him.

"Only proving my point more," she murmurs.

His pins her eyes down with his stare, an arrow shot expertly piercing a bird's wing and holding it in place. "Never enough," he tells her, moving in towards her lips again. "Never enough, Kate."

The kiss is less needy and intense, but oh, how it sends a shudder through her like she's only known in moments shared between the two of them. She wants his body on top of her, but she also wants to cry and have him hold her. She wants him in ways that terrify her. So she pulls back, runs her hand down her dress, and lets composure fill her throat.

"Take me out, Castle."

He's having trouble breathing, his broad chest like a caged animal fighting its bars, and she can tell by the poise of his swollen, lipstick-smeared lips that he's about to ask her if she's sure. She puts her finger against his mouth and smiles.

"Come on, Rick. Show me off."

He grins stupidly around her finger before kissing it tenderly. She wants to feel alive with him tonight. She wants to capture the remaining heat of the dying autumn and bring it to bear between them with the whole world to witness. They've made it safely to shore after a series of hard-hitting storms, and she wants to celebrate.

They go to a small place, one of her favorites, and the crowd is just right, not sparse but not overwhelming. Happy hour is in full swing at the bar, but she doesn't want alcohol, doesn't need it. The darkness brings her in with welcome and the music moves to invade her veins. His hands span her hips from behind as she cuts a path to the dance floor. On weekdays the DJ doesn't try so hard to be up-to-date with his selection, so she knows she'll hear a nice variety tonight. She turns and pulls him into her, catapulting herself into his fire. She's consumed instantly, his burn the thing that marks her fractured life with joy and purpose.

The consummate writer, he speaks his every emotion through the poetry of his touch. His need, his desire, his devotion to her and only her… she feels it everywhere in her body. Sometimes she marvels at how they both used to hold back so much, because now it's all laid bare. Now he can tell her how he loves her, but he says it constantly, wordlessly, through his eyes. This one tether to their past, before they were them, it means a lot in this new context.

His hand rises up her thigh and sends a feeling like blinding sunlight into her delicate skin. Slowly he pulls back her dress, giving himself room, staking claim to what he can with this many people around. She's sighing, her back flushing against his chest. All around them the beat is demanding, Usher singing of his need amid the thumping speakers and dancing bodies. _Baby, let me love you down. There's so many ways to love you._ He's gripping her in every way that he can, his palm burning a hole against her inner thigh, his other arm circled around her waist with a certain, insistent tug. His tongue is taking its time against her earlobe. All her gloom is loosened, melting against him as it transforms into glittering submission. _Got me like oh my god, I'm so in love, I found you finally._

He spins her mercilessly so that she slams against him. Like they've lost their sight they grip maddeningly at each other, treating tangled breaths like bed sheets, smiling like the light of a new day has revealed them to each other.

"How did it take us so long to start doing this?" he asks, sounding genuinely amazed at their past restraint. He's asked this on numerous previous occasions, but it's right to voice it now, because she really doesn't know. That one time he rubbed his thumb against her hand, demonstrating how to appease the dog they briefly shared, comes to her mind, allowing her to revisit her breathlessness at the way he coursed through her veins like sweet poison. All that magic, just in the tip of his thumb. She shakes her head. A whole fathomless ocean had been waiting for her to arrive at it, and now she is constantly out to sea, drifting through the evidence of how they are made for each other.

She cups his face in her hands and tells him that she loves him in between her testimonial kisses.

* * *

><p>He thought she would want the bed, but she doesn't. She wants the whole day off of her. She wants to be clean.<p>

"Run the shower," she whispers as she shimmers her shoulders out of her dress.

Once the material has pooled around her feet and water is speeding out from the showerhead, he moves towards her like a man on a tightrope. They hold each other's eyes, even as he unclasps her bra, even as he hooks his thumb around the lace of her underwear and pulls down. The frenzy in her is gone, lost to the steam quickly filling up the bathroom, and now she just wants the lull of it all. All day he has been reaching out for her, bringing her back from the brink. Now she wants to let it go. She wants to reach back and never let go.

He pulls her into the shower. His lips find her, fill her with everything he has. All for her. All for them. "Kate," he mumbles against her skin so that his need burrows through her on every possible channel. He meets her every sigh with her name. "Kate."

The same page. Even after over a year of this, she has to prove that she's never going to backtrack while he skips ahead. Never going to close the book and put it away when he just adds epilogue after epilogue. The same page.

She's aware of so little. She can feel her arm stretched up over her head, seeking stability from the wall. The rest is a pleasant, delicious haze of skin and trickling water, softening her mind so that the only thing she can manage to think in the middle of all of it is just words coming alive against her – _Doubt that the stars are fire_ – his hand reaching up and gripping hers, holding on with her – _doubt that the sun doth move_ – his hips dwarfing hers with physical, overwhelming generosity – _doubt truth to be a liar_ – the uselessness of breathing when they are no longer two, but one.

"Castle," she cries. "Castle, promise."

He looks back at her, water slipping from his lashes, his eyes storms that will sweep her away at any moment.

"Kate."

"Castle." She's never been more sure, or more afraid, or more in love. "Promise me forever."

"Oh, Kate." His voice touches her as deeply as the rest of him does. "Kate, forever. _Forever_, I promise."

Her tears look no different from the beads of water clinging to her face, but she knows he sees them. He zeroes in on them and wipes them away. Making her clean.

"Then I will," she breathes. _But never doubt that I love_. "I do."

* * *

><p><strong>So I started this before "The Limey" and finished it after. Honestly, I'm heartbroken, but writing this helped. Thanks to Woody Allen, Usher, and Shakespeare for lending me their voices.<strong>

**Reviews always appreciated. Thanks for reading, loves.**


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